Risk & Strategy (or One Week | One Tool, day 5)

Today was mostly typing up loose ends. We followed our now-regular schedule of having an all-team meeting at CHNM HQ at 10am. Each team reported in on their progress. Some of the discussion was to clarify what features will and won’t be rolled out on launch day. Some of the discussion was about what needs to be done before we all go our separate ways, and how we will time the actual product release next Tuesday.

I spent my time much of my time futzing around with the web materials and strategizing the release. It was a day of incremental changes, refining verbiage, making lists. Probably the more-tedious-less-sexy day so far at OneWeek. However, much of that tedium was mediated by the growing number of in-jokes and banter-around-the-table. We’ve started getting comfortable with each other and with our routines. But it’s that kind of comfortable that I remember from summer camp–where the intensity of a week spent with my fellow campers means that we’ve gotten to know a lot about each other in a short period of time, while knowing very little about each others’ “real lives.” Even though that’s the case, we’ll have the OneWeek reunion to look forward to next year at THATCampPrime, and I’m sure our paths will cross often as we’re at conferences and other career-related events.

On Twitter today some of the conversation hinted that maybe all the hype about our tool is just a smokescreen, or maybe we’ve set people’s expectations too high. It’s true that the tool we’re rolling out offers one small-ish (though significant) innovation. It’s true that we’re not going to revolutionize the world with what we’ve done this week–it would be impossible (even with the skills of our programmers) to roll out anything too huge after just 4 days of code-writing. But it’s also true that one of the most important things we’ve learned through this workshop is the importance of calculated risk. It’s risky to forge forward with a digital project without months of planning, coding, and testing. It’s risky to trust near-strangers to deliver on such a tight deadline. It’s risky to assume that we could all get along with each other. And it’s risky to assume that our audience will believe in our tool as much as we do.

Our team selected one of the more daring choices available for our project. We were ready to be bold and to dream big. Even if the rest of the world doesn’t see our tool’s potential to be as earthshaking as we do, the process of manifesting our vision for this tool has been a valuable lesson in and of itself, and will certainly carry through to our future endeavors.